LONDON — Roald Dahl’s
Dirty Beasts poems have a musical cadence that might explain why, after the success of
stage versions of
Matilda and
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, three of them are being set to music to introduce young
people to the orchestra.

The anteater that gobbles a spoiled rich boy’s aunt, the flying toad that can turn itself into a
roly-poly bird to escape frog-loving French gourmands, and the girl with a bag of sweets who sits
on a porcupine and has to have quills removed by a dentist have been orchestrated by composer
Benjamin Wallfisch for a Tuesday premiere at London’s Southbank Centre during the “Imagine”
children’s festival.

“I was hoping with this piece aimed at people under the age of 10 to inspire them to explore the
orchestra,” Wallfisch, 34, said from his home in Los Angeles.

The festival this year features a major strand of Dahl tributes to coincide with the 50th
anniversary of the publication of
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The author died in 1990 at age 74.

Luke Kelly, Dahl’s 27-year-old grandson, who helps direct his estate, said the Welsh-born author
and one-time fighter pilot had a knack for writing works that lend themselves to adaptations.

“The characters are so boiled down and the humor is so present, I think it does translate to
many mediums, whether it’s musical, films or operas,” Kelly said.

Wallfisch has scored movies ranging from the Norse action film
Hammer of the Gods, with an all-electronic music track, to a lush
Summer in February, set in an artists’ colony in the English county of Cornwall.

Wallfisch, whose father is renowned cellist Raphael Wallfisch and whose cello-playing
grandmother survived the Auschwitz extermination camp, has been an enthusiast of improvising on the
piano since childhood.

He was also strongly influenced by family trips to the movies.

“In the 1980s, there were all these amazingly great pieces of music being written for film, and
I tried to understand and get my head around them,” he said. “After we would come back from
Star Wars or
Indiana Jones, I would go to the piano and try to figure out what was going on there” in
the film soundtrack.

For
Dirty Beasts, he has composed what he describes as “a sort of trilogy which lasts about 20
minutes,” to be performed during three additional concerts by the London Philharmonic — starting
with
The Porcupine on Feb. 16, followed by
The Anteater on May 11 and
The Toad and the Snail on Oct. 26.

The trickiest of the three, he said, was the poem about the anteater, in which Dahl has fun with
the different pronunciations in America and Britain of
aunt.

In America,
aunt sounds like
ant, and this prompts the starving anteater, whose spoiled owner lives in San Francisco,
to gobble down the old woman — and then say to Roy, “You little squirt, I think I’ll have you for
dessert.”

Wallfisch’s hope is that his
Dirty Beasts trilogy might have some of the same effect on a new generation of one of his
favorites from childhood — Prokofiev’s
Peter and the Wolf, in which each character is portrayed by an instrument.